Redux: The Great Reckoning
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The Sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears. I'm Steve Allman. I'm Cheryl Strayed. This is Dear Sugars. Oh dear someone, won't you please share some bit of sweetness with me? I check my mailbox every day for a bit of sugar.

Hi Cheryl. Hi Steve. Hi Portland, Oregon. Hi Revolution Hall and hello Wonderly. And hello everyone here. Thanks for joining us tonight for our Dear Sugar Summer Party. So you thought that you were here to have fun.

You know, we like to kind of keep things sort of surprising. And hostile. And hostile. So our theme today is the great reckoning. The great lighthearted reckoning. So what is reckoning to you, Steve? Well, reckoning is taking account. Reckoning is that

difficult stare back at your mistakes, your transgressions, your delusions, and sometimes your dark teachers, as you would say. Yeah. Wild is, the whole book is a reckoning, I think. And in fact, when I decided to take the hike on the Pacific Cross Trail, I don't know if any of you guys are aware that I did that. But what happened... Haven't read the book. Those of you, yeah. Yeah.

The movie's okay. Yeah. Well, the book is always better, but...

But, you know, so we, when we were talking about this theme, Steve and I shared with each other, you know, what were the times that you had a reckoning? And of course, my mind went to that time, you know, where I felt that I had squandered my ambition and my writing and my intelligence and all of the kind of positive things about me. I reached that bottom moment in my life that I think many of you in the room have been in at one point or another as well. And that was the reckoning. What if

you know, you have to change your life, that beautiful, real gay line that has really rung throughout my life. And that's when I knew I had to do something that would compel me to do that. And I decided to take that long walk. And that whole, you know, those 94 days on the trail, every one of them was a reckoning. It was a reckoning physically,

But it was a reckoning in terms of me really thinking very deeply about everything in my life. That's what happens when you walk alone for a long time, is you have the opportunity to think about, of course, those great figures that all of us have to reckon with, our mother, our father, the people who loved us and nurtured us and failed us and hurt us. And that's what that hike was all about for me. That was my first real reckoning. What about you, Steve?

Well, it's beautiful to hear you talk about that because it's such an intentional act that you underway. When we started talking about this, my mind flashed to a very different sort of reckoning. And I guess they call it an involuntary reckoning. I was like 21 years old and I just graduated from college and I tried to get a job on the East Coast because I thought that would lead to, you know, winding up at the Boston Globe or the New York Times or something that would please my Jewish mother. And...

And I couldn't get a job. I really wanted this one job in Quincy, Massachusetts. That was sort of the feeder paper for the big ones. And instead, I was offered a job in El Paso, Texas, where

And a few days after I got there, an editor at the Quincy Patriot Ledger called up and said, hey, Almond, we're calling you up from single A to the big leagues or at least up to triple A. I have that job that you so desperately want. Would you like that job? And I'd been in this job for about three days. And I said, yeah, of course. I just checked with my superego and it said, yes, take the job.

And you had just gone cowboy hat shopping too, right? At that point? I had spurs and assless chaps at that point. At any rate, so I took the job and I had a strange thing happen, which was this involuntary reckoning. I just simply went into an immediate panic attack. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep.

I found myself weeping everywhere, you know, on the sidewalks. I would go into a restaurant and trying to eat huevos rancheros and inexplicably weeping. If you find yourself inexplicably weeping over a plate of huevos rancheros, you're in the midst of a reckoning.

If you want a warning sign, that's what's happening. But I had no idea kind of what was going on. I only knew after about a week, like, I don't think this is how it's supposed to feel when you make a decision. And so I called the guy at the newspaper in Quincy and said, I'm sorry, I can't take this job. And he was confused and furious.

And I begged for my job back in El Paso. And she was merciful and gave me my job back, partly because of the assless chaps. But that's another story. But the point is that it was unlike your journey. It was involuntary. It was literally my body having a reckoning, seizing control and saying, you cannot do this. And it took me many years. For many years, I thought this was a

A failure on my part, something that just kind of a episode that I was ashamed of. I'd gone crazy or I couldn't hack adulthood or something. And in fact, what it was, was a positive reckoning. It was the invisible hand of art.

seizing control of my life and saying, you cannot do the safe, expected thing. You have to sometimes recognize that you're going to take a different, more unconventional path. And I'm so glad I did that many years later because it's led me to you, Cheryl. That's right. That's right. So we're going to have two really amazing guests tonight. We have Mitchell S. Jackson and Rebecca Skloot in the house. Thank you.

And we're going to talk to both of them about times of reckoning in their own lives. And also, we're looking forward to answering your questions. But first, should we bring Mitchell on stage? I think we better do that. I think it's time for that. I think we better do that. Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of The Residue Years, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence.

He is the winner of a Whiting Award, and his honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation. Currently, he's a clinical associate professor of writing at New York University, and his fantastic new book, Survival Math, will be out next year. Please welcome to the stage, Mitchell S. Jackson. ♪

How many of you heard Mitchell's episode, You Must Change Your Life?

on the podcast. It was really one that so many people loved. But can you tell us, for those who haven't heard your story, a bit about your life and what has brought you here? Okay. I just wanted to pay a compliment first because I remember after that episode, like I went to somewhere and I saw one of my gangster homeboys. And he was like, man, I heard you on that Dear Sugar episode. Yeah.

I was like, what? Yeah. Dog, you listening to Dear Sugar? So you have a, you know, widespread audience. I like it. I like it. Yeah. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. So I grew up in the Northeast. I,

I played basketball just like all the other kids when I was young. My mother started struggling with addiction. The short end of that is I started selling drugs when I was in my teens, off and on, until I was a junior in Portland State University. Shout out to the Vikings. Anyone there? What the hell? Yeah.

And you should back up. You got a full scholarship to Portland State. I did. Because you were a drug dealer, but you were... I was smart. Also a straight-A student. Yeah. To be clear, the scholarship was not in drug dealing. No, it was not. So you were a good student. I was a good student. And dealing drugs at the same time. Yes. Yeah. And so I got caught when I was a junior. Ended up going to prison, San Diem in Salem for a little while and

came out and went back to school, luckily, because they held my scholarship for me. And, yeah. You know, when you told me that, I just want to say that's so beautiful of Portland State to have done that. Well, it was. Yes. But I told them that I had a family emergency. Oh. Yeah. Which was not a lie. Right.

That was an emergency. They were kind enough not to insinuate on more information. Okay, okay. I'm glad we have that clear.

So you go to prison, you get out, you go back to Portland State. I go back. I get an undergrad in speech communications because I thought I was going to be a newscaster. I started working at COIN as a news, I forgot what it was called, news assistant or something like that. And then I went back to graduate squash, actually the first graduating class of Portland State's MA program. In creative writing. In creative writing, yeah. Yeah.

And then I left there and went to NYU and got another master's and I stayed. So tell us about what you thought about when we asked you to come on the show and talk about Reckoning. A personal reckoning for me was the night I got caught.

And I say that I didn't anticipate it, obviously. Well, actually, you kind of do anticipate getting caught. You just don't know when that moment will come. And so I got pulled over. I remember it was raining. I had a young lady with me.

And I was sitting in my back of my car. And the strange thing was like I had done a report or some research on the drug sentencing laws. So I knew what the federal laws were and I knew how much product I had and how much time that was likely to get me. And so they didn't immediately find the drugs. They were searching and searching. It maybe took five minutes. But when he found it, he like held it up in the light.

And he was like, yeah, look what we got here. And I was like, immediately I start calculating all this time that I'm possibly going to do. It's like a pre-reckoning right there. Yes, it's like a pre-reckoning.

And then he comes over to me and he was like, where'd you get this? I'm like, man, I've never seen that in my life. What is that? Yeah, what is that? Exactly what I said. He was like, well, whose car is that? So it's my car. He said, it's your car and this is under your seat. Man, I don't know. You know, somebody was driving my car. And so the reckoning came when he came back to me and he said, you know, we don't believe this is yours either.

And you can make this a whole lot easier on yourself if you just tell us who it is or where you got it from. And in my mind, I'm going, here's 10, maybe 20 years over here. Yeah. And here's a name over here that I know.

And it happened really quickly. But I was like, I don't want to be the person who gives up someone else. And the reckoning is like, you're going to have to stand up to this decision making that you've been making for all of these years. And so I was like, I don't have a name for you. And not knowing that whether I was going to do a year or two years or 10 years or, you

So I think there, the reckoning come when you kind of like peek into your future and you decide if that's the person you can live with. And I said, I can't live with that person. I just could not fathom me being the person that had that as a knock on them around the community. I would have rather gone and done five or 10 years than to have that, to answer to that. Yeah. One thing I'm struck by listening to your story, Mitch, and also Steve's story and

also what I said about those moments of reckoning for each of us, is that in so many ways, we were doing the wrong thing. I wasn't busted by the police, but I was in some ways busted by myself. You had realized you were on the wrong path.

What happens is that terrible reckoning, we think of it almost as destruction, but it's the thing that allows us to the next thing, which is always a better thing, that creation. And for you, it was the beginning of that, I think, right? Yeah. I mean, you went to prison and you decided there to change your life. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Well, I don't know if it didn't occur to me as a life change. Uh-huh.

It occurred to me as an experience that I didn't want to repeat. I didn't want that to define who I was in the community. So I knew that I had to do something different. I didn't even have the idea to be a news anchor then. I just was like, okay, I'm not going to play basketball. And when you're not going to play basketball, like, well, then who am I? It took me a long time to figure that out. So should we read the letter? Yes. Yes.

Dear Sugars, I'm a 26-year-old straight female. Since day one of my graduate school program, a female friend has had a huge crush on a man in our program. When she confessed her feelings to him several months ago, he told her he wasn't interested in anything more than friendship. A few months later, she told me that she went on an internet date to get her mind off this guy. The next night, I was out with a group of friends that included my friend's crush.

He and I danced. It was fun and hot. One thing led to another, and we ended up having incredible sex. I woke up thrilled about the night we'd had and terrified about what I'd done to my dear friend. I immediately told her that this man and I had kissed the night before. She said, if two people want to be together, I don't want to get in the way. I took that as her blessing and continued having sexy rendezvous with this man.

My friend later texted me and asked for space from our friendship and told me she was taking my fling with her crush harder than she thought she would. Three weeks later, we all found ourselves together on a trip. By that point, our relationship was common knowledge in our friend group, and I shared a room with my new lover.

My friend was upset and angry we were sharing a room. One night, we all went dancing. My lover and I snuck away so we could dance together without judgment. A few of our friends saw us together and asked us to stop dancing out of respect for our friend's feelings. She was sullen and withdrawn from me for the rest of the trip. I felt uncomfortable and hurt that I was being policed by our friend group and also a little slut-shamed.

My lover moved away and we ended our fling, but I'm having trouble coming to terms with my friend's behavior.

From my point of view, adults do not call dibs on other adults. The man in question told my friend months ago he wasn't interested in anything more than a friendship with her, and I've tried to be as honest and upfront with her as possible. I don't believe that her feelings made this man off-limits to me. In addition to that, I'm resentful that I had to put so much emotional energy into managing her emotions when it could have gone into this great guy. And yet...

I miss my friend. What do you think, Sugars? Am I a man-stealing bad friend? Is it futile to try and win back my friend's trust?

Why do I crave a friendship with a woman who judges my sexual and romantic relationships as immoral? And what about my friend group? Is the best option for me to walk away from them and rebuild my social circle? Is it wrong to date or sleep with someone your mutual friend has feelings for, even if you know nothing will happen between them? Signed, the heartbroken crush stealer. What do you think, Mitch? Ooh.

This is on you. I mean, if she was in my crew, she'd be out of pocket a little bit.

because I think one of the things I was thinking about when I was coming here was about subtext, right? So if that's your friend, then you understand the subtext when she's talking to you and she's like, oh, it's no problem, but she doesn't really mean that. And as her friend, you're supposed to interpret that. And then plus she gave you one, it doesn't really matter. And then like a hundred other ways to show you that this was hurting her. Including a literal text. Right, a literal text, yes. So there was subtext followed by a text.

Right, right, right. You're like ignoring all of that. And then you actually, you're calling this a fling, which means you didn't even think it was serious. You didn't say like, this is my boyfriend or like, we've been having a great romance. You're like, the fling is gone. And now I want my friend back. Well, you kind of asked out a little bit. Right. No, I mean, you know, I hope that they mend it, but I don't know. I just want to introduce two sentences. The first sentence is,

Right after you've had this incredible sex, I immediately told her that this man and I had kissed the night before. And meet this sentence. I've tried to be as upfront and honest with her as possible. Yeah. Can I just say one thing that I think is in the subtext of this letter, which is there's not a moment of the man being held accountable for his action, even though allegedly...

He's both of these women's friends, not even a scintilla of, well, maybe he should be behaving differently. I agree with both of you that that first take that this is somebody who I think aspires to honesty. We've all been in that position, right? She wants everything she wants. She wants her friend. She wants to have a fling with this guy. And just like you say, Mitch, she's never saying anything.

You know, what happened is I realized that even though this friend of mine has a crush on him, he and I really have a heart connection. We're really falling in love. Right. Okay. But I think that she's trying to do the right thing. And clearly she's struggling with this. She has written to us because she's reckoning with him.

something she did wrong. And what happened is she thought that she could get what she wanted without consequence. And there were consequences. And they weren't, she keeps using this word immoral. She uses it twice in the letter. I don't think anyone, I don't think the friend or that friend's circle, I don't think they're telling her that what she did was immoral. I think they're saying to her, what you did was hurtful. You know, when somebody says, you hurt me, I trusted you, I feel betrayed by you. Well then,

You have to answer that in some way if you genuinely claim to care for somebody and love somebody. And so maybe, you know, heart stealer, the thing you have to learn from this reckoning... Let's correct it. She's not a heart stealer, but she's a heartbroken crush stealer. I mean, I think I would say what you have to reckon with is that you're a complicated person and you're maybe not as kind...

as you think you are. And that to me, I would much rather have a friend who came to me and said that to me rather than try to pretend like, well, he said he wasn't interested in you. You said it was okay. These are all kind of true and they're kind of not true. What's really true is if you look at your friend and say, I knew that you really cared for him and I cared less about you than I cared about getting what I wanted in that moment.

And that doesn't make me a monster. It makes me human. And I learned something from having done this. I would forgive that. Right. And if it wasn't forgiven, you at least have reckoned with it. You've paid that price. And I think that's really what our letter writers are always doing. I think of our inbox as just a giant box.

pool of reckoning. By the official rules, you're allowed to become romantically involved with this man. But you clearly knew that it was going to be hurtful to your friend. And then you did two things. One, you really did lie about the extent to which you were involved. And then, interestingly, all of you engineered a scenario that was additionally hurtful, by which I mean when you found yourselves all together on a trip. And I think

It's a lesson to us all. Sooner or later, you're going to have to pay the price. And the longer you lie about it, the longer you dodge from it or fail to be considerate, the bigger the price is going to be. It's when you withhold that price that it keeps getting heavier and heavier. When I first separated from my first husband, one of my, at the time, it was a very good friend of mine. We were such good friends that we went on a like 800 mile bicycle trip

And it was just us, and we camped every night in the forest in Minnesota, in Canada. And we're in southern Ontario, and we're in this tent. And this whole time, I've been just separated from my first husband. And I'm crying and talking to her every day about heartbreak. And she says, there's something I have to tell you. You know, your ex-husband came to my house like a week before we went on this trip. And we ended up making out. Wow.

And I'm alone with her. I only just remembered this now. I'm alone with her in a tent in the middle of southern Ontario. And I was just like so shocked. I mean, so she and then but what she did and what I realized, I mean, we're not we're not friends anymore. Because what happened is this.

Everything was my fault. I had broken my first husband's heart. I had lied to him. I had cheated on him. So when I cried, when she told me that she had made out with my husband, I was still married to him. She said some version of, you deserve this. You're the one who wanted to break up. And I was like, but I'm still, you know, I still have feelings. And it took me many years to

for me to feel sympathy for myself. And I think that that's maybe the deepest thing, is that, you know, I do think you did something wrong. Heart Crusher, is that her name?

Heartbroken. Crush. It's too complicated. Heart mangler, I think it is. But I also think that you have the right, that you're also worthy of our compassion and our empathy. And I think that you did what a lot of us do when we meet somebody we want to have sex with. You had sex with them. Right. And...

You know, and that's not like a bad thing. And like part of being in your 20s especially is learning, you know, what the consequences of acting on every desire. And so I think that that's the lesson is that the next time you enter into something like this, think about what it means. Yeah. It's such an instructive story show because...

Yeah.

You shouldn't be arguing, this guy didn't like you anyway. You can't call dibs on adults. That's not your job. You can't place her reckoning and your reckoning against one another. You have to say unilaterally, what I did was hurtful. I'm sorry. I should have been upfront and honest with you. I did want to follow that desire, but I'm also your friend. And I should have realized that it was my duty as a friend to confess that to you and

to have a discussion about it. Yeah. I just wanted to say, just thinking back that she's in her 20s and that, you know, we got to give people not a pass, but like, I do understand that, you know, 20s are still a time for making mistakes and not

So I just wanted to mention that and say that I'm empathetic for anyone making mistakes in their 20s. Actually, I think that's your job. Honestly, the job description in your 20s is to make mistakes. And it's not a question whether you're going to make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes. It's what do you do with them? Yeah.

So I think we should bring our beautiful house band out to sing us a little song about this subject we're discussing. Let's do it. Ladies and gentlemen, Wonder Lee. She's on her last train coming in She's on a late train to me I'll set my place up at the station She's gonna know she's home

So I'm so excited that we get to have Rebecca Skloot with us tonight.

Rebecca Skloot is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which was made into an Emmy-nominated HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. Her award-winning science writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Oh! The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. Please join me in welcoming Rebecca Skloot to the stage. Thank you.

So where do we begin? I don't know. It was interesting when we thought about bringing you here. Of course, we thought about the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks just being...

basically a book of reckoning, right? That huge cultural kind of thing that came from her life and her cells. And I understand that you are done talking about that book. I'm never going to be actually done talking about it. I know. We'll talk about it forever. But now you're writing another book that's about another kind of reckoning. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. It's funny. I'm still at the stage with this book where

It takes me about an hour and a bottle of wine to explain it. And at the end I go, and it's going to be really interesting. And I did that with the first book for a long time too. But the next book is about animal research and animal rights and our relationships with animals, how complicated they are. The fact that you say that now, yes. And in a lot of ways, it's a great reckoning. Animal research and our relationships with it, it's something that nobody wants to reckon with.

everyone benefits from it. Everyone in this room has benefited from it in ways that you can't imagine. There are just so many ways and nobody really likes to think about that. And it's never as simple as you think it's going to be. And there is never, this is the good guy, this is the bad guy. And that's sort of everything I write. In some ways, it's about, all right, we have to tell the truth about something nobody wants to really tell the truth about. And nobody comes out looking the way you think they will. And it challenges everything you think you know.

So you, the last time we were together, it was actually on the day of the last Live Dear Sugar show back in February when we did your book launch, Bad Stories. And you were about to go off to the McDowell colony and you went for six weeks. But before you went, you broke up with your longtime boyfriend. Yes. So tell us about what happened at McDowell. Yeah, so a relationship that I was in for 15 years ended.

a week before I was supposed to go to McDowell, where every single artist who's ever heard of McDowell is like, oh, you get to go to McDowell. That's the most amazing thing. It's his cabin in the woods. You write, you do your art. It's in New Hampshire. Yeah. And there's all these other amazing artists there. And basically your days are alone in your cabin in the woods reckoning with your art.

So I didn't plan to go spend six weeks in the woods in a cabin by myself immediately post 15 year breakup. But that's what I did. And I am a storyboarder. This is how I figure out my stories when I'm writing a book. So the first book is multiple narratives are all braided together in these very complicated ways. And I got to McDowell and I was supposed to go there and just write this thing.

And got there and was like, there's no way I can do that, in part because there was so much going on in my life that I was kind of reckoning with, but also that my...

personal life had become intertwined with this book in ways that I had no interest in writing about, in part because the way I've approached this book is I've spent years now just immersed in research facilities, spending time in a primate research center, following around the scientists who are doing the work with the primates and really following all the research that's happening. And

My approach every time I show up at one of these places is to say, okay, how does this affect my life with one degree of separation? So the research that I'm seeing, does this affect my life personally, some disease, you know, something that I have suffered from, one of my parents, my friends, my dogs, like,

So I had been doing that for a long time and there'd been these moments of real overlap with my life. But then in the moment that I sort of the big kind of great reckoning moment with my relationship was that I was showed up at a research facility and I never know what research they're doing when I get there. And the day I arrived at this facility, my ex sort of disappeared and there was a lot of lying and there was a lot of

Crazy stuff that happened. And he wasn't your ex yet? He wasn't my ex yet, no. And I showed up at this facility and what they were doing research on was deception and its impact on the brain. They were looking at monogamy and its connection with empathy. And there are certain species that...

Yeah, you can see where this is going. And they were looking at the physiologic effects of relationship stress. And I spent a whole week in this facility. And during the day, I was spending time immersed in all this research. And at night, sort of immersed in the research of the sort of deception of my own life. And

During the week that I was there, everything that was happening in these primates in their bodies started happening to me.

Like what sort of examples? Well, I mean, the most kind of immediate was that they, one of the things that they were looking at was the impact of relationship stress. It causes sort of adrenal overload, like your adrenal glands just, you go into this fight or flight mode and you stop being able to eat. And it affects your sleep patterns. And even if you do sleep, you don't go into REM sleep. So just basic body functioning that gets affected by that kind of stress affects

And I was just so aware of it during the day. I was like watching these animals and seeing what they were going through and then just like, yep, that's exactly what's happening in my body in this very second. So then I went to McDowell and I was like, how the what? Like, no, this was not what this book was going to be about. And the only way I could sort of figure out how to think about all of this, what was happening in my life and also what was happening with this book was to storyboard it.

McDonald's in this tiny town and they have a little office supply store there. And I went there and I bought all of the index cards that they had in the town in these three different colors and just started storyboarding basically the last 15 years of my life.

And the ways that it overlapped with the book. And to do this, like I'm a journalist, I went back to my research material, I went back to my email archives and my journals. And you know, most people who've been through a breakup, you know, part of what you do is you're like, oh, but the good times and it wasn't. And I know this as a writer that the stories we tell ourselves are not often very accurate when you really compare them to the way things happened. And

so many things were clear very quickly from it. And one was that, you know, as is often the case, like all of this was there from the very beginning. And a lot of the deception was self-deception. There was no doubt this is where this was going 15 years ago in some ways.

And my editor came up and saw this storyboard and I walked her through it all. And she was like, I'm really sorry this happened to your life. Like, this is, of course, your book's not done yet. Now I understand why. But also, he just handed you the climax of your book. And I was, you know, and that was exactly what I didn't want it to be. And, you know, so I think in some ways the storyboarding was a reckoning with my own life, a reckoning with the book, hoping in some ways that I was going to find what I knew I wasn't going to find, which was that

The book is different. It isn't actually this thing I had to write. I can do something else, but that's not the case. And it turns out it's going to be harder. It's going to be much harder, yeah. But also much more honest. And in a lot of ways, it's just a book about truth. But the good news is that you're not alone. This is why Steve and I really do this podcast, is that when we start to feel...

about having so many problems and secrets and struggles and sorrows. We only have to check our email to know that we are not alone in all of this, all of our confusions. So Becca. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us on Dear Sugars. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for having me. And now we are utterly convinced that your next book is going to be very interesting. Thank you so much. Everyone, thank you. Thank you.

Okay, we're going to do the final round of advice giving. And we're going to answer all these questions that you guys wrote on the index cards. We can't answer them all. But you know, one thing too, we've learned that the bigger the index card, the longer the letter. You guys wrote us some letters. Yes.

So Steve, do you want to start or should I? I shall start. Yeah. Here we go. Steve, you seem preoccupied by the rapidly alternating themes of rage and forgiveness. It seems fussy. I say let yourself break a plate and not feel compelled to relive all of your past trauma. Cheryl, what do you think? Can't we sometimes just be pissed? Absolutely. And we should be.

What sometimes happens, and I've actually been thinking about this a lot in the context of our political realities right now, what's happening with not just the leadership of our nation, but, you know, all the people standing behind that leadership who aren't sad about what's happening. And I feel really, really angry about that. And, you know, I've always, as Sugar, and, you know, in my work and in my life, you know, the way that I have come to terms with

the people personally who've enraged me the most is that I've, you know, decided to get to a place of forgiveness with them. But I think that forgiveness is not the same as not having any anger anymore. And so, you know, my feeling about what Steve does, what I witnessed him doing in his work and in his life is that what he's saying is rage is a really powerful and important force. Do not relinquish that, but do not let it rule you.

And so this is something that comes up a lot too lately. I think a lot of us are feeling like I'm mad all the time. I'm sad all the time. And, you know, where does this end? And do I have a right to ever just have pleasure and have fun? And what I say is you absolutely do. And that is the way to hold both forgiveness and rage in one hand, essentially. Yeah.

I'll say a quick thing or just tell a quick story because it has to do with my experience in El Paso and my decision to stay there. One of the things that happened or one instinct that I wasn't aware of but that was keeping me in El Paso was that it was a very extreme environment. It's the largest border metropolis in the Western Hemisphere with El Paso and Juarez.

And it was just a very extreme place to live for somebody who'd been as sheltered as I was. And in the mornings, I could go out onto my, I had this little crappy apartment, and I could go out onto the balcony. And what I would see, literally 100 yards away, was day maids, women who worked as maids in the United States, crossing the Rio Grande, which was dirty and toxic and just dangerous. They were usually on the shoulders of mulas, who were these guys who would be paid

you know, a dollar basically to take them across the river. This is happening at six in the morning. And these women would scramble up the concrete embankment and then they would go through what they call the tortilla curtain, which was just a chain link fence. And they would have on their heads, they were carrying in plastic bags, the clothes that they would wear to go clean houses. And they would have to change clothes

there right on the edge of America, and they'd have to strip down to their underwear and put on their clothing. It was sometimes cold and they would be shivering. And they were constantly afraid that the migra, the INS vans, these puke-green vans, would pull up and deport them back to Juarez. They'd make them walk across the bridge.

And so they were dressing in a great hurry, and then they would run through the low desert scrub and try to settle into the street life of South El Paso. Then they would go work for 12 hours, doing work at a price and particular kinds of work that Americans wouldn't do. And then they would walk across back to Juarez, Mexico, and, you know, that was how they supported their family. And those were the good old days. And the proper response to what is happening right now is,

is to be enraged by the atrocity of how human beings are being treated. And we're all a part of that. Nobody looks back in the late '30s and says, "But there were some good Germans." That's not how it works. We're all a part of that. And Cheryl's absolutely right.

Cheryl's right when she says that I want us all to literally stand up and say we are going to use the rage that we feel. We're not going to wallow. We're going to stand up like citizens with a conscience and make sure that there is an absolute electoral repudiation of cruel, inhuman, ineffective, corrupt governance. And that's on all of us. Absolutely. And...

If we don't, there will be a reckoning. Rage is generally a defensive emotion. It masks a certain kind of grief, I think, usually. But if it is useful in this moment to be angry, if it gets you up out of your chair, away from your screen and into the streets, or at least taking political action, then rage on. Oh, is it mine? Oh, yeah. Dear Sugars, I love my family with all my heart.

But this weekend, I'm alone because my kids and husband are out of town. I am so much more relaxed and happy. What do I tell people? I mean, honestly, this is how Erin feels whenever I go out of town. And it's no longer a secret, folks. She's just like, oh, you're going to be gone. Okay. Especially if I take the kids out.

She's delighted because she has people emotionally and physically hanging on her at all times. And it's exhausting. And don't feel guilty for a second. You earned it. And it sounds like you need more of it and claim it. Yeah, and it's funny. We all...

And when I first read that, I laughed too. But when I think about it on a deeper level, as somebody who's also, I have kids as well, is I think it's really important for parents, but especially women, to tell the truth about...

how good it feels to do things like be, you know, not in the company of your children. And, you know, there's something really, this isn't news that, you know, mothers are blamed for everything. And we're supposed to, the story we're supposed to tell about motherhood is a pretty uncomplicated one, that we would do anything for our kids. And we love our kids above all. And we always put them above all. And what's been interesting in my own life is that all of those things are true.

for me. I love my kids beyond measure. I would do anything for them. But in my own mothering life, what I realized is that I also had to claim space for myself.

You know, I think that it's okay for us as women to say, yeah, it's, you know, these two things here again can exist together. Just because the story that we've been told about motherhood through all time is this one thing doesn't mean that we don't have, it's not really our obligation to tell the more complicated, truer story. And the truer story is, I love my kids and husband, and it's really nice when I have a weekend to myself.

So congratulations, whoever you are in this room. We're all happy for you. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever given advice and then heard back from the recipient that this advice made things much worse? How often does this happen? How does it make you feel about the work you do? And it's signed curious about consequences in the crowd. No.

You know, it's interesting, though. We do have people who, I mean, obviously, every time we give advice, a bunch of people write to us and tell us that we're jackasses. But never have we heard from the person...

to whom we gave advice that they said that was no good. But we also often get this kind of response, and those of you who were at the last live show know that somebody wrote to us and said, hey, thank you for the advice, but once I heard the show, I realized that I hadn't told you the whole truth in my letter.

That in some ways, when we're slightly off the mark about something, it's because the letter writer hasn't done that work of really revealing the whole truth about what they're asking us. That too is its own kind of reckoning. You tell one version of the truth and then what sits beneath that is a truer version. And sometimes we get that top layer. We don't always get everything. Well, also the way that

Cheryl really started writing the column was just, I don't believe you give advice. I believe you bear witness to what people are struggling with and tell them a story about your own life and that we're not interested in trying to cling to conviction or have the right answer. We're interested in

trying to honestly explore a really complicated set of struggles. So we don't sit there and say, yes, leave them, unless the letter writer is telling us, I really want to leave them, but I can't quite admit it yet. Okay. We only just have time for like one or two more questions, Steve. That's crazy. Okay. So I'll do one, and how about I do one, and you do one. But this one is a long one. Dear Sugars, I'm a dapper butch lesbian...

bow-tied and bespectacled, that means wearing glasses, charming and well-mannered. The problem is that it seems like only straight women are attracted to me. Partly I suppose it's nice that these women feel safe flirting with me, and God knows I flirt back.

Aw.

So that's a letter that begins in complaint but ends in lament, if you know what I mean. But what I appreciate about that letter, by the end of it, you're saying, I'm lonely. I'm not getting from the world what I really want. I'm getting something that I don't want. So we know something has to change to just realize whatever I'm putting out into the world isn't getting me the thing that I want back is maybe the most important thing to realize. Yes.

Yeah. And I do think that there's a reason that these women are flirting with you. And probably whatever it is you're putting out there is that it is safer to flirt with those women because you're not going to get with them, as you said. They're not going to actually want anything from you and you don't have to take any risk in being vulnerable with them. It's all just kind of a joke. And so in some ways, I think what you're up against is

having your own reckoning with how do you dare to be more vulnerable with the women you meet and get a little closer to asking for what you want sooner than you're doing right now. So, you know, I think that this, unfortunately, you know, like so much of the advice we give, it's always about going into that deep work of the self and

examining you know it's not about what's out there it's about what's coming from here here's one thing i know for sure is that there is love there for you there is somebody there who will love you and they will not be a straight woman who's just flirting with you there there's a woman out there who will love you for who you are it's not always easy to find that person but you know the place to start is to with with that that person you're putting into the world yeah

All right. Here's our last one. Last one. It's a real reckoning question. It just says, in your darkest of times, what keeps you going? So that's actually such, to me, it's become such an easy answer, I think, in my life. And it sounds so hokey, but, you know, I get to be kind of hokey because, you know, we do call ourselves sugar, right? It's love, you know, and I think that that's

It's my greatest fortune is my life is full of love. You know, I give love and I get it back. And those are the things I sort of call upon when I'm feeling alone or confused. There's always somebody in my life who can just help me with that or talk to me or give me that sense of beauty that is the friend you take a walk with or the...

the husband who holds you or what all of those things and I think that for me that's been especially important when I feel so up here with the sorrow and the rage and the anger I'm so powerless about what's happening in the world and there's so much hatred there's so much the opposite of the thing that's actually present in my life which is love what about you

There's sort of lots of answers. The first thing I think of is my kids, of course. But I think the thing that I want to believe is true is that what keeps you going through the darkest of times is the awareness that you will get through the darkest of times, but you're going to have to face that that's also how times sometimes are. You know, the price of the examined life is a certain amount of sorrow.

And I think a lot of people are sort of trying to skip past that or sort of skate over the surface or just zone out on a screen. But part of the reason that I love the work that we do together and the work that we try to do as writers and certainly as parents is just to bear witness to everything that life is. A lot of it is incredibly joyous.

And it's miraculous, really. But in the end, it's true. And that's what reckoning is, is you recognize there are going to be dark times and I'm going to have to face them before I get through them. But there's always help. Yep. So, Steve, we... Oh, I got to read the credits. Just stick with the Texas theme. I reckon we're done. I reckon we are. All right. I need to read this.

Dear Sugars is produced by the New York Times in partnership with WBUR. Our podcast producer is Alexandra Lee Young, and our special event producer at Revolution Hall is the multi-talented Jim Brunberg. He's playing piano right now. That's him. That's Jim Brunberg. Hi.

Our editor is Paige Cowett. Our managing producer is Larissa Anderson. Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin. And our editorial director is Samantha Hennig. We recorded this show at Revolution Hall in the mighty city of Portland, Oregon. Thank you.

With our engineer, Neil Blake. Our mix engineer is Eddie Cooper. Our theme music is by Wonderly. With vocals by Liz Weiss. And tonight, vocals by the amazing Angela Freeman. She was so awesome. Thank you.

Please find us at thenewyorktimes.com slash dearshugars. You can send us your letters at dearshugars at nytimes.com. That's dearshugars, plural, at nytimes.com. Or leave us a voicemail on our hotline at 929-399-8477. And please check out our column, The Sweet Spot, at thenytimes.com slash thesweetspot. Thank you, guys. Thank you all for coming. We love you. Thank you.

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